Like some others, I think the Rogue is too good. However, I hate the idea of the Rogue losing his high damage potential.

My suggestion is to tone down the Rogue's ability to kill higher level enemies by lowing his damage bonus but giving him Reflexes as a passive. This doesn't hurt his damage output (I think? Assuming he has -30% bonus damage), but it does mean he will struggle to kill things that he can't take at least one hit from.

This might be a significant nerf in a lot of situations, but it would allow him to override First Strike (since Reflexes has maximum priority now), giving him a niche.

Perhaps the health penalty could be scaled back a bit if this makes him too weak (or maybe he could get Dodge prediction back).

No no no no no no no! We've been down that road; you're asking for trouble if you do that!

Otherwise, it's an interesting suggestion, but reflex is a very dangerous effect to throw around. Consider a rogue with 40% attack bonus who builds up to 100% from items and boosters. That's x2 damage over normal. Now consider that same rogue who starts at 0 and builds up to 60% from the same items and boosters. He's now at 3.2x normal damage. While his first-strike finisher will be slightly weaker, his overall damage will actually be significantly higher.

No no no no no no no! We've been down that road; you're asking for trouble if you do that!

Yeah, I imagined. But since Reflex incorporates First Strike then the Rogue's First Strike passive would be redundant and he'd need a new one. Maybe they could go make slight changes to the name and just split up the Reflexes effect like so:

Otherwise, it's an interesting suggestion, but reflex is a very dangerous effect to throw around. Consider a rogue with 40% attack bonus who builds up to 100% from items and boosters. That's x2 damage over normal. Now consider that same rogue who starts at 0 and builds up to 60% from the same items and boosters. He's now at 3.2x normal damage. While his first-strike finisher will be slightly weaker, his overall damage will actually be significantly higher.

I figured the math wasn't as simple as I initially thought, but I proposed a starting attack penalty to compensate for that fact. Is it even possible to set it at a number that would essentially keep the Rogue's damage output the same?

(I pulled an all nighter and am pretty tired or I'd love to think deeper on this. Thanks for the feedback anyway, I've been considering this idea for awhile and it's nice to talk about it)

All you're doing is turning it into a human-only bonanza. You'd basically need to give it the monk treatment - smacking both its base attack and attack bonus - to make this work, but that would probably make purist rogue a complete and total disaster and require heavy prepping to function.

As I said, it's an interesting suggestion, but double-strike is too powerful an effect to allow it as a permanent buff rather than a once-off.